National Affairs: Coming Out Party

(See front cover)*

When the United Fruit Liner Pastores docked in Manhattan one day last week, ship newsmen singled out one passenger to ask one question. The passenger was Pennsylvania's Governor John S. Fisher. The question: Would he sign a certain official paper which would release from his State's Eastern Penitentiary a certain convict? Governor Fisher told them: "I'll sign it in the routine way when I get around to it." He went on to Harrisburg, unmindful of the crescendo of public interest in the release by the State of Pennsylvania of its most famed prisoner, the No. 1 underworking of the U. S., Alphonse Capone, known to good citizens no less than to gunsters throughout the land as "Scarface Al."

If Governor Fisher did not get excited about signing the release papers, many another individual did. Before dawn the next day a curious crowd began to collect before the great grim wall of the Eastern Penitentiary at Philadelphia to watch the Capone coming-out party. Policemen appeared, formed lines. When two closed vans rattled out of the prison gate, the crowd pressed forward with a common question, "Is Capone in there?" The Philadelphia Record spread a scare-headed story that Chicago gunmen were in town to "get" the prisoner when he emerged. The Warden informed newsmen that Capone had had scrambled eggs for breakfast. This fact was flashed over the country. From Harrisburg came word that Governor Fisher had signed the necessary papers for Capone's release at 11:07 a.m., that a special courier was carrying them to the penitentiary. A rumor spread that an airplane awaited Capone at Camden.

Hours passed. Capone did not appear. Newsmen grew restive, suspicious. There were grumblings among good citizens who had turned out to see a real "bad man." Darkness came. Finally Warden Herbert Smith announced his trick:

Capone had been smuggled out of the Eastern Penitentiary in one of the two vans during the morning, carried to the new State Prison at Grater Ford (pop. 180), 25 miles northwest of Philadelphia. There he had been freed four hours earlier. A blue Buick sedan, it was reported, had streaked away into the underworld. "Al" Capone was again at large.

No desperado of the old school is "Scarface Al," plundering or murdering for the savage joy of crime. He is, in his own phrase, "a business man" who wears clean linen, rides in a Lincoln car, leaves acts of violence to his hirelings. He has an eleven-year-old son noted for his gentlemanly manners.

Last May Capone stopped off between trains at Philadelphia as he was returning from a "business meeting" at Atlantic City where he had helped arrange a peace pact for Chicago's liquor gangs. Outside a cinema theatre he was arrested for carrying a revolver. Immediately he pleaded guilty, accepted a year's sentence with such apparent relish as to give rise to the belief that he was really seeking refuge in a Pennsylvania jail from hostile gunsters (TIME, May 27).